Elon Musk may be the most famous tech billionaire with an interest in spaceflight, but he's certainly not the only one. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also has a company, Blue Origin, which is doing similar research into reusable craft to get us to-and-from the heavens. The normally secretive outfit has just revealed that its first test vehicle, New Shepard, made arguably its most important, partially successful test flight yesterday. In the experiment, the priapic craft took an (empty) crew capsule to a height of 307,000 feet before releasing it to float gently back to earth.

With the recent completion of its BE-3 engine, the New Shepard space capsule from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin LLC is almost ready for liftoff, the company's president told reporters on Tuesday. "The engine is ready for flight...and ready for other commercial users," Blue Origins president Rob Meyerson said. The New Shepard is designed to carry three passengers and cargo on suborbital spaceflights. This could include deliveries to the International Space Station or using just the motor itself to launch satellites into orbit.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk service is all about using humans to perform computer-like tasks, such as identifying objects and transcribing videos. However, those workers are tired of being treated like automatons -- they've launched an email campaign urging Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to market Mechanical Turk staff as the humans they are. Ideally, they'd be treated as "skilled, flexible" people with real identities, not just as tools for time-conscious customers. They're hoping for a public response from Bezos, and also want to shake off stereotypes of Turkers as unskilled or working solely for "beer money."

Wondering why NASA gave Boeing the lion's share of its space taxi funding? Jeff Bezos could have something to do with it. Shortly after NASA awarded Boeing $4.2 billion in funding, the Wall Street Journalclaimed the company padded its bid with a partnership with Bezos' Blue Origin. Turns out, the WSJ was right: today Blue Origin and the United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin) entered an agreement to fund and build the Blue Origin BE-4 rocket engine. Basically, Boeing is going to build NASA's space taxi capsules and Bezos' rocket company is going to launch them out of our atmosphere.

NASA may have been even-handed when it started doling out money to contractors for its space taxi program, but there are hints that it's about to play favorites. The Wall Street Journalhears from anonymous officials that Boeing is now the odds-on favorite to get the majority of NASA's astronaut transportation business. SpaceX, once thought to be the frontrunner, would be relegated to a "second source" alongside Sierra Nevada. Reportedly, the agency sees Boeing's CST-100 capsule as the easy choice -- it carries relatively few risks, and is more likely to be ready for business in three years than SpaceX's Dragon V2.

Update: Sure enough, NASA announced its contracts today. Boeing will get the lion's share of the business with $4.2 billion in funding, but SpaceX isn't exactly a bit player here -- it's getting $2.6 billion. Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser won't be part of the picture, however.

Despite sounding like a rogue militant organization from G.I. Joe, Hachette is actually a book publishing group. Tame as that may sound, Hachette is currently engaged in a high-stakes game of Chicken with a juggernaut in the book sales world: Amazon. It's all part of a long-running dispute between book publishers and "the everything store"; even the book titled after Amazon's moniker was involved in the dispute. It goes like this: Amazon wants to price its e-books one way, and publishers want things another way. While the negotiations occur, Amazon pushes back by slowing delivery of physical books by publishers involved in negotiations or, sometimes, carrying limited stocks intentionally so the books are unable to be ordered. Another tactic Amazon's now employing in the dispute? Appealing directly to authors. With cash.

Amazon didn't provide a live stream for its festivities earlier today, but if you'd like to relive the unveiling of its first smartphone, now you can. The nearly 1 and a half hour Fire phone event video has been posted to YouTube and we've included it after the break. Don't have that time to watch Jeff Bezos explain why you'll slip this universal buying tool into your pocket? Check out all the info and our first hands-on impressions first.

What has six cameras, a large screen and tracks your head? Amazon's new phone, probably. The company's first handset has been long rumored and occasionally leaked, but now the company seems ready to make it official: Jeff Bezos is hosting a hitherto unannounced "launch event" later this month. The company's page for the event is little more than a invitation request form, but an attached teaser video meshes well with the purported phone's rumored head-tracking capabilities. "It moved with me!" exclaims an unnamed tester, staring at an object just out of frame. Sounds neat.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to 60 Minutes to reveal the company's latest delivery method: drones. In what is likely a cunning reminder of the e-tailer's upcoming Cyber Monday sales, these bots will apparently be capable of delivering packages up to five pounds (86 percent of orders are apparently less than that), with the aim of getting them to your house in under half an hour. The system is called Prime Air and the octo-copter drones, which wait, ready to deliver, at the end of conveyor belts, have a range of 10 miles. As Amazon puts it, "Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations" and Bezos himself added in the TV segment that it won't be before 2015 at the very earliest. While it sounds like they''ll take their time to get here (if they ever do), we've at least got a video of the drones in action -- it's right after the break.

Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.

Brad Stone's book on Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos is set to be published next week, but Bloomberg Businessweek has offered an extensive look at what's in store with this cover story/excerpt from the author, including one of his biggest revelations. Drawn from interviews with hundreds of those who know or have worked with Bezos, the piece offers the most in-depth look yet at Amazon and its evolution into what Stone describes as the "Everything Store," as well as what Bezos himself is like to work for.

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

It's no surprise, of course, that the Kindle Fire HDX was the thing Amazon wanted to shout about from the Seattle mountaintops today. But Jeff Bezos had another little surprise up his impeccably tailored sleeves -- a surprise that makes the $229 HDX look downright extravagant. A warm (if decidedly overcast) Pacific Northwest welcome to the new Fire HD. Well, "new" is perhaps not entirely accurate. This Kindle shares a lot with its predecessor, though there are some notable changes. Namely, the body. See, if we're strictly talking form factor here, this guy is a dead ringer for the 7-inch HDX. Inside, however, you'll find last-gen processing power: a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and on the front, the same old 1,280 x 800 display. Still, not too shabby for $139 -- that's $60 less than the last version cost moments before this post went up.

That price also gets you access to Fire OS 3.0, aka "Mojito," Amazon's latest sugary rum of an operating system. Naturally, some of the new features just won't work on this hardware -- things like Mayday, which requires a microphone for use. Like the HDX, this slate plays nicely with those neat new Origami covers. You can pre-order one right this second, but you'll have to hang on until October 2nd before it actually starts shipping.

"Today, we're going to show you the third leg of our device business strategy," Jeff Bezos begins. His audience is modest: four people sitting around a table in an Amazon conference room. It's a far cry from the Santa Monica airplane hangar his company rented out for last year's event. Bezos picks up a dry erase marker and begins breaking down the first two parts, elements the company has focused on since it first began building Kindles. "One," he says, narrating the words as he goes along, like an enthusiastic high school teacher, "premium products at non-premium prices. Two: make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

"We sell our hardware and roughly break even and then when they use the devices and buy content," he adds. "Our point of view is that this is more aligned with the customer. We don't have to get discouraged when we see people using fourth-generation Kindles. Bezos draws a Venn diagram to illustrate the third part of the puzzle. He writes "customer delight" on one side and "deep integration throughout the entire stack" on the other. The intersection houses the "hardest" and "coolest things," which utilize OS, key apps, the hardware stack and the cloud. "It's a little abstract," he adds, "but I think it will be extremely clear when I show it to you." The template for the third piece of the puzzle is the new Kindle Fire HDX series -- the company's latest premium tablets.Slideshow-90904 Slideshow-90903

You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

Some big (and surprising) news in the media industry today: The Washington Post has just confirmed that it and its affiliated publications have been acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million in cash. The paper notes that Amazon itself "will have no role in the purchase," and that Bezos "will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days." It also goes on to explain that the existing Washington Post Company, which owns a number of other businesses (including Slate), "will change to a new, still-undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter."

In an interview with the paper, the Post Co.'s chief executive, Donald Graham, says that "The Post could have survived under the company's ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive," adding, "I'm not saying this guarantees success but it gives us a much greater chance of success." In a letter to Post employees, Bezos, who was apparently one of several suitors considered by the company, says that he "won't be leading The Washington Post day-to-day," but that "there will of course be change at The Post over the coming years," and that "we will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."

Here's an epic fight that won't take place inside the octagon: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are apparently competing to take over a NASA launchpad... and instead of dishing out jiu-jitsu moves, they're letting money do the talking. In particular, the dotcom billionaires' space companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, are bidding for Kennedy Space Center's historic Launch Complex 39A -- site of NASA's first and last space shuttle blast-off. Each company's plan for 39A is to launch both unmanned missions and shuttles carrying commercial customers and astronaut crews into space. Bezos' Blue Origin, however, also aims to turn it into a multi-use facility where other companies can launch their rockets for a price. NASA's keeping bidding details on the down low, but seeing as it wants to offload 39A in October to save money, we'll know soon enough who'll win this battle of the dollars.

Jeff Bezos' expeditionary team already believes that it's recovering Apollo 11 engines from the ocean, but it now has firm evidence that it's on the right track. The group has just found a serial number (pictured above) linking a salvaged thrust chamber to the fifth F-1 engine on Apollo 11's Saturn V rocket. While there's more identification work to go, the discovery shows that Bezos' conservation project is paying off. The timing is also rather convenient -- it gives us a fitting tribute to the NASA explorers that reached the Moon 44 years ago.

What's an e-commerce tycoon to do after funding everything from nuclear fusion startups to commercial spaceflight ventures? Why, help develop a museum exhibit to inspire young folks and teach them about innovation, of course. After more than two years of development and $10 million from Jeff Bezos' own pockets, the Museum of History and Industry will open the doors to the Bezos Center for Innovation on October 12th. Not only does the center aim to help visitors learn about "the importance of innovation" through interactive exhibits, but it will toot Seattle's horn for being "the birthplace of so many trailblazing companies." If you can't make it to The Emerald City, we're sure Bezos has a few learningalternatives in mind.

You'd think running a company like Amazon would keep a guy busy. But like many of his fellow billionaires, Jeff Bezos still has big dreams. Space dreams. As of late, the exec's been spending time onboard the Seabed Worker (much of which has apparently involved working on his computer from the cabin), alongside a crew tasked with recovering F-1 engines from the Apollo program, which are now a part of an "incredible sculpture garden...that tells the story of a fiery and violent end." Seems Bezos has been exercising his poesy muscles in the cabin, as well. The team has apparently recovered enough F1-parts to construct two engines, which will go on display to help "inspire something amazing." More striking images from the expedition can be seen in the source link below.

Jeff Bezos seems like a nice guy with big dreams (and a bigger wallet), but some Amazon patents make us worry that there's a sour cherry at the heart of all that whipped cream. The retailer has been awarded a patent entitled "Facilitating improvement in the results of human performance of tasks," but is actually concerned with not paying potential digital employees if their services are deemed to be unsatisfactory. Those whose efforts are judged and found wanting could have the option of taking a reduced cut of the original fee, or getting computer-aided feedback on how to improve and snag the rest. While we hope this one remains locked inside a Seattle filing cabinet, we can just see how Judge Judy's going to react when people take Mechanical Turk disputes public.

As avid patent-watchers may recall, an application for a rather unusual contraption from Amazon surfaced last summer -- one that detailed an airbag system designed to protect portable devices from falls, with none other than Jeff Bezos himself listed as one of the two inventors. Now, it's no longer just an application, as the USPTO officially has granted the patent to Amazon today. Of course, that still means it's likely a long ways from finding its way into an actual Amazon product (if it ever does), but don't be too surprised if your future Kindle Fire 4K XL 5G one day saves itself from an imminent demise.

Remember when Texas Instruments revealed it was planning to dump its mobile processor business in favor of embedded systems? Israeli business sheet Calcalist is reporting that Amazon is in "advanced negotiations" to snap up that part of TI's OMAP division, which currently supplies processors for the Kindle Fire and the Nook HD. The paper suggests the company is emulating Apple's purchases of chip designers in order to lower the price of future hardware -- which it currently sells at cost.

Amazon makes a pretty good case for its Kindle Fire HD and Paperwhite with prices as low as $199 and $119 respectively, but it turns out there's more at work than just special offers to keep them affordable. In an interview with the BBC, the company's head honcho Jeff Bezos revealed that they can keep the price tags reasonable since they don't turn a profit on the devices. "Basically, we sell the hardware at our cost, so it is break even on the hardware," Bezos said. "We're not trying to make money on the hardware." Instead, Amazon banks on making a buck when owners of the slates and e-readers purchase books, movies, games and other content through their digital storefront. This doesn't exactly come as a surprise, but we're glad that Jeff's confirmed our suspicions.

Huge week for Amazon, last week. But all that Kindly goodness was nearly upstaged by lock-screen ad nonsense. When I searched on the keyword "amazon" in my RSS tech folder, Friday and Saturday of last week looked like two big parade floats: "OMG, there are ads on the new Kindle tablet!" and "Praise the heavens, you can disable the ads!"

Tempest in a teapot, those ads. And Amazon took the wrong approach to removing them.